Blessed Are the Cheesemakers Read online

  Corrie leaned forward and snatched the cheese away, snapping Abbey out of her trance. She looked at him questioningly.

  “Smells delicious,” he explained. “But tastes like shite.”

  It was true. Those who had actually eaten the love cheese were repelled by its overambitious flavor and its tendency to give lovebirds breath like the water left too long in the bottom of a vase. Once the thing had done its magic, one was better off by far to stick with Coolarney Gold.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “If you can see the magic in cheese, you can see the magic in everything.”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  Kit stood next to Avis, refusing to believe what he saw.

  The morning air in the dairy was thick with the smell of effluent and milk and the sound of raindrops on rosebuds and whiskers on kittens. The Pregnasaurs were milking in time to the soundtrack of The Sound of Music and for a moment Kit thought the cows were actually dancing. On close inspection, they proved to be merely shuffling, but he couldn’t be 100 percent sure that it wasn’t in time to the beat.

  On the other side of Avis, Abbey was equally astounded. She’d had a grim night’s sleep, feeling ill at ease with all around her. In the middle of the night she had come to the conclusion that she was once again in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here she was, Corrie’s own granddaughter—and yet she felt less like part of the family than anybody else there. It didn’t bother her that the place was full of unmarried mothers-to-be and other hangers-on. She felt quite comfortable with the aura of unusual. It was something else that irked her. Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Something tall and handsome, perhaps, and just a tad goose-bumpy.

  “What a sweet song.” She smiled up at Avis as the milkmaids harmonized over their favorite things. “So when the dog bites or the bee stings, you’re supposed to think of something happy. Sounds like that film Pollyanna.”

  Kit peered behind Avis to see if Abbey was kidding.

  “It’s from The Sound of Music,” he said incredulously. “You know, the most successful movie musical of all time?”

  Avis climbed aboard the tractor and started to drive toward the dairy.

  “Oh, I never saw that,” Abbey said.

  “You never saw The Sound of Music?” Kit couldn’t believe it. “I thought it was like, compulsory, for every kindergarten pupil.”

  “Hello,” said Abbey, “look around you. How many kindergartens do you see? I lived here until I was five and then we moved to London where, excuse me, I never saw The Sound of Music, but Les Mis and The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Ask me anything.”

  “Oh, I never saw either of those,” Kit said, moving to where Avis had backed the trailer to help load up the milk.

  She watched the two of them converse uneasily and wondered where this was all going to lead. She knew Fee had high hopes for the two of them but if she had to put money on it, she wouldn’t. They were coming from different directions those two, and there’d already been one collision. Her heart ached for Abbey, who she could see had inherited her mother’s social awkwardness. Rose’s way of dealing with it had been to make herself the center of attention, but Abbey seemed to lack the bravado required—for which, Avis supposed, they could all be truly thankful. She could already tell that the girl had more feeling in her little finger than Rose had in her entire body. It was just a matter of giving her the courage to handle it. Having the girl back, no matter what the state of her, had certainly given Fee a spring in his step, she thought with a smile, although she’d caught Corrie this morning, his tea gone cold in the cup, with such an expression on his face it nearly broke her already aching heart. Abbey being around was bound to dredge up memories of Rose, she supposed. She just hoped that the joy of one would help drown out the pain of the other.

  Kit and Abbey sat on the back of the trailer, their legs dangling over the edge, as Avis drove the milk to the dairy.

  “So you do know about Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, then?” Kit was asking.

  “What? Are they together?”

  “No,” he said. “About them being, you know, the world’s biggest box-office stars. And you know about e-mail and cell phones?”

  Abbey rolled her eyes. “I was in the Sulivan Islands, not—” She tried to think of somewhere more remote, coming up, lamely, with, “Iceland, you know. We had satellite television and DVDs before most of the rest of the world, including the United States of America.” In fact, she wanted to point out, if he looked very closely he would see that she was currently sporting Julia Roberts’s haircut, thanks to the latest InStyle and Imi’s DIY hairdressing kit.

  God but she was a hard nut to crack, thought Kit. Anyone would think he had asked about her dead wife in front of a roomful of people, not the other way around. Dead wife? He rolled the words over in his mind and wondered where on earth he could go to clear his head of Jacey. He was tired of the claim she had on his thoughts. Every time he started to appreciate where he was, she floated into his mind in a flimsy dress and brought him back down to earth with a dull ache in his stomach where he wanted a drink to be.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as the trailer rattled and bumped over the crunchy turf. The morning sun was throwing the beginnings of the day’s heat on the back of his neck, and it felt calm and soothing. He relaxed his shoulders and welcomed the warmth.

  Abbey was watching him out of the corner of her eye. Something about him just made her want to swing out and give him a good slap. Was it because he was good-looking, she wondered? And well-dressed? And nicely spoken? And confident? And charming? And so at bloody ease with everything it made her want to scream? Or was it because of what had happened between them at the dinner table last night? Not the thing about the dead wife. No. He’d given her a shock, she was sure of it. Or she’d given him one. Either way the two of them had been zapped, and she didn’t know what it meant but she didn’t like it. They had sat there after it happened eating cheese and pretty much ignoring each other until her extreme tiredness, jet lag she supposed, had provided the excuse to sneak off to her room where she had hardly slept a wink.

  Fee had informed them the night before that there was no time like the present and they were both expected to shape up for cheesemaking duties, but all the same, Abbey had been surprised to find Corrie gently knocking on her door at six o’clock.

  “Have you ever—”

  “Is this the first—”

  She and Kit simultaneously tried to break the excruciating silence between them.

  “Never mind.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  They both laughed humorlessly, relieved to be almost at the factory.

  “Holy Mary Mother of God,” Fee prayed, watching the two of them coming toward him as Avis reversed the trailer up toward the east door and the milk tank. This was going to take more than Coeur de Coolarney, that was for sure. Wordlessly, Kit and Abbey helped pour the milk into the tank, then at Fee’s behest entered the factory for the lowdown on Old Fart Arse. Inside Corrie hovered in the background, watching his granddaughter like a hawk.

  “So the aim of this heap,” Fee said, giving Old Fart Arse a thump, “is to heat the milk to 72 degrees Celsius for fifteen seconds, a process which kills off a lot of the allegedly harmful bacteria, thank you very much Louis fecking Pasteur, and does the same to most of the flavor.”

  “You think pasteurizing the milk is bad?” Abbey looked confused.

  “Well, didn’t we all survive perfectly well without it?” Fee glowered.

  Kit opened his mouth to argue, but decided against it. Abbey forged blindly ahead.

  “Has the cheese not always been pasteurized?”

  “Most certainly not!” said Fee, while Corrie murmured, “Jaysus! Here we go,” from behind him.

  “It’s a recent requirement of the Irish health authorities,” Fee said with a forced smile, “in case one in a million people keels over with something that might or might not have come from
an edible substance that might or might not have been cheese that might or might not have been made in this country. In France, of course—” He stopped, and smiled a calm, smoothing smile to himself.

  “Happy thoughts,” Corrie chipped in dryly from the background.

  Abbey and Kit shared an uneasy glance.

  “We can talk more about that later,” Fee said, with forced serenity. “Now,” he said, pointing to the outlet from the milk tank, “our lovely shorthorns’ elixir comes out of this pipe here and is pumped directly over here.”

  They followed his finger to a collection of similar stainless-steel pipes that ran beneath the pasteurizer and turned corner after corner, like a huge French horn, eventually splitting in different directions around Old Fart Arse’s barrel.

  “Eventually the milk comes from here”—Fee was following a pipe on the other side of the pasteurizer now—“to the cheese vat. We call her Anneke.”

  “Hang on,” said Kit, still looking at Old Fart Arse. “The milk goes from the tank through the pasteurizer and comes out here?”

  “It comes into this vat here,” Fee said again, patting Anneke on the side, “like I said the first time.”

  “But it goes from this pipe here?” Kit insisted. He was back by the tank, pointing to the first pipe.

  “If you can’t keep up I can go slower,” Fee said nastily, but Corrie was smiling.

  “Exactly what are you getting at?” Abbey asked impatiently.

  “Oh, nothing really,” Kit said. “It’s just that if the milk comes out of this pipe and stays in this pipe”—he was tracing the pipe with his smooth, long fingers under and around Old Fart Arse—“ending up in this pipe—it is in fact all the same pipe.”

  Fee looked at the ground.

  “And?” prompted Abbey.

  “And,” said Kit, “that would not at any stage involve actually going through the, um, pasteurization process.”

  There was a tiny silence.

  “Well, if he’s going to be picky,” Fee said in a slightly whining tone to Corrie, “he can feck right off.”

  Kit chose not to take umbrage. His mother, actually, had always sworn by the locally made unpasteurized cheeses that were sold from farms around Vermont. He’d grown up with the strong earthy flavors of raw farmhouse cheese and didn’t object in the slightest to Fee protecting Coolarney’s original flavor, although he worried about the consequences of being caught.

  “So you only pretend to pasteurize the cheese?” Abbey asked, agog.

  “We pasteurize it when we have to,” said Corrie. “Which tends to coincide with a visit from the local inspector.”

  “R. Swoole,” Fee said bitterly.

  “I’m sure they all are,” agreed Kit. “But don’t you have to keep records?”

  “We certainly do and they’re impeccable,” Fee answered.

  “You’d have to go a long way to find records tidier than ours,” agreed Corrie.

  “Avis does them on a Thursday night and I swear that woman has the neatest handwriting you ever saw. She could have been a nun with that handwriting.”

  Kit was not to be distracted. “But wouldn’t you have to keep the records as you went? You know, times and temperatures and all of that?”

  “Is he messing with me, Joseph?” Fee asked Corrie.

  Corrie shook his head. “We have stringent hygiene measures, highly safe and sensitized curing procedures, exceptional packaging skills, and Fee, of course, knows when—” He stopped and changed tack. “Ah, sure, I wouldn’t dwell on it if I were you.”

  “If we can continue,” Fee said pointedly, opening the valve and letting the milk whoosh into the vat.

  The smell as the warm milk hit the clean stainless steel was almost overwhelming. It reminded Kit of babies and homes and kitchens: things he pretty much never needed to think of.

  Abbey too was soaking up the smell. She could remember now being here as a child, when she didn’t even reach the top of the vat. The floor seemed familiar, as too did the slurping and gulping noises of so many gallons of milk starting their journey toward something much, much more interesting. The air in the dairy was warm and wet and yet somehow strangely refreshing. It felt like the beginning of something.

  “Once the vat is filled we test the milk to see if it has reached thirty-five degrees like so,” Fee said, sticking his elbow in the milk, closing one eye and poking his tongue out, “and Bob’s your rudd!”

  “For heaven’s sake,” called Avis through the east door. “Stop messing.”

  Fee looked sheepish and held up a thermometer tied with a chain to the side of the vat. “There’s no getting away with the slightest thing with Herself hovering around in the background,” he grumbled. “Okay, like so.” He dipped the thermometer in the milk, where its digital reading showed them the temperature was in fact 35 degrees. “You’re probably better off using the thermometer to begin with,” he said. “Then, when you know the milk is the right temperature, you add the starter.”

  Corrie handed over a plastic cup, which contained what looked like tiny rice bubbles. Fee poured it into the milk and gave the stuff a stir with a long stainless-steel pole with a sort of potato masher on the end of it.

  “Now, I don’t want to go all technical on you because you’re probably not able for it,” Fee said, giving Kit a particular look as he did so, “but the bought-in stuff is basically a prescribed lactic bacillus. Good old-fashioned bacteria. We know exactly what’s in it, where it’s come from, everything about it. No surprises there, feck the lot of them. Put this in your fecking milk and you will get fecking cheese.”

  Kit looked from Fee to Corrie and back again. “And that’s a problem?” Kit asked.

  “Wouldn’t no surprises be a good thing?” Abbey wanted to know. “Wouldn’t always getting cheese be a good thing?”

  “Are yis undercover agents for the government or wha’?” Fee said grumpily, his ears turning pink as he concentrated on stirring the milk.

  “Very occasionally Joseph has trouble embracing change,” Corrie said. “Just ignore him on that account.”

  “Embrace, me arse,” Fee grumbled crossly.

  “But why wouldn’t you want the cheese to be the same every time you made it?” Abbey asked her grandfather.

  Corrie answered quickly to head off Fee before he burst a gasket. “Well, the cheese is basically the same,” he said, “although really it changes from day to day given the girls, the grass, the milk, and whatever you’re having yourself. But the differences now are far milder than they once were and the purists”—he looked at Fee—“would say that a hundred years ago half the pleasure of a decent Coolarney would be not knowing exactly what to expect, just that you could expect it.”

  “I guess that doesn’t fit into a modern marketing plan, huh?” Kit ventured. “The surprise factor’s a bit harder to sell these days.”

  “Listen to him, with all his modern marketing,” Fee mumbled grouchily under his breath, although privately he was begrudgingly pleased that the boy was on to it so quickly. “Now, if you could stop talking amongst yourselves for a moment and pay attention,” he said importantly, “you’ll notice I am now adding the rennet, which is what makes the milk coagulate and form the curd.”

  “Where does that come from?” Abbey asked.

  “Well it used to come from the stomachs of little baby calves,” Fee said, “but now we buy that in, too.”

  “It’s an enzyme,” Corrie butted in, “that turns the liquid into solids. Some cheesemakers use a vegetarian one but Himself won’t hear a word of it.”

  “Ah, you don’t know how they molest that stuff,” Fee exploded. “They feck around with DNA to get it, for feck’s sake. Yeast DNA. Did you even know that yeast had DNA? Next thing they’ll be growing cheese on a mouse’s back.”

  “But what about the vegetarians?” Kit asked, thinking of the calf-stomach rennet’s appeal to the Pregnasaurs.

  “Well, they can buy vegetarian cheese if they want to,” Fee repl
ied. “I’m not stopping them.”

  Before Kit could respond, an almighty cacophony erupted from the factory office. “What the hell is that?” he asked, startled.

  “That’s Ruby and Marie,” Corrie said. “They take the orders and deal with the office administration and they work very hard and we greatly appreciate them.”

  “Not that they’d ever stop their clattering long enough for us to tell them,” Fee said.

  An hour later Kit and Abbey were exhausted from attempting to translate Ruby and Marie’s patchwork of instruction. Corrie and Fee had left them in the capable hands of the two workers, who had between them demonstrated the computer ordering system, the packing process, how to make four cups of tea with only one teabag and how to dance without using their arms—which came as a particular surprise to Abbey, who had never heard of Riverdance. When they emerged back into the factory, Corrie and Fee were smiling into the vat. By now, the curd had formed and was floating in the watery whey.

  “How about that?” Kit said, impressed. He’d never really thought about the process of cheesemaking that much before. That it started out drinkable, and something made it edible.

  “Now’s the fun part,” Fee said, smiling. He handed Abbey a blade paddle and demonstrated with his own one how to weave and cut through the curd.

  “You’d think it’s not stiff enough to stay put and be sliced,” marveled Abbey as she started cutting through the solid curd. “But look at it!”

  Fee handed Corrie’s paddle to Kit and watched his strong, young shoulders maneuver the blade through the curd. In the morning light of the dairy, he looked, for a moment, just like Corrie had forty years before. Fee saw that Corrie had seen this too, and felt for his old friend. Of course it was grand to be delivered not one but two cheesemakers on a platter like this but on the other hand . . . Life would never be the same, and they both knew it.